What was it like to use your Mac back in the day?
I remember using my first computer in 1995. It was a Packard Bell and was the first time I ever saw a GUI. I played around in drawing apps and kid's games. I also learned to type. I believe I used an Apple IIGS in elementary school.
When I look at the computers that were "sensational" before then and cost multi-thousands of dollars, I have to wonder why. I can't quite comprehend the need for performance before the introduction of digital video and audio or the media-rich internet.
In the entire history of the world, time and making things easier are the primary reasons for inventions and progress.
My first computer was a DEC PDP-8E at my high school in 1975. You wanna talk slow? Try waiting for a printout with a 110 baud (that's ten, TEN! characters a second) of oh, 2-3k of BASIC code. Even CRT displays of the day were not a lot faster.
Back in the 1970s, 80s and before, the primary drive for computer performance was how much faster what we would call trivial tasks today like spreadsheets and word processing (there really was not a lot like e-mail back then) faster and more efficient. Long before we had "desktop" micro computers, there were Word Processing "machines" with a mini computer and CRT display built into a standard office desk.
The faster the machine works, the more work can be done. Not any different from any other industry or task. In ages past, we took our laundry down to the creek to wash, now we pop it in a machine, press a couple buttons, and in an hour have clean clothes, a task which might have taken half a day or more.
In 1985 or 1990, why would you choose to spend so much money on a computer? Why was one option better than the other? Did you really need another 10mhz? Was your life made easier by adding 6mb of RAM? Was there a time when a computer you bought one year made the computer from the prior year hilariously obsolete?
See above. In the early 1990s, the Macintosh IIfx was the fastest 68030 Mac that could be bought. Content creators would fall over one another to get their hands on one, even though they started at $8,969 (up to $10,969), the equivalent to $19,293 today.
The impact of newer processors wasn't always in the raw performance. Performance per dollar was (and still is, despite what some would say) highly important. The 68030 in the IIfx was clocked at 40 Mhz. In 1994, Apple introduced the first PowerPC Macs, the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100 & 8100. The top end 8100 in its basic configuration had an 80 Mhz PowerPC 601, and retailed for $4,249 ($8,060 today). The performance difference was enormous, more than what a doubling of the processor speed would indicate.
When I see the PowerPC Apple introductions, everybody is losing their minds over the performance. Did you ever witness a real-world scenario where a PowerMac G3 was really the only solution to your computing needs? Were they really super computers in comparison to the x86 Windows world?
In a lot of ways, yes. One of the big performance drivers has always been Adobe Photoshop. In 2022, lots of cheap or free apps can do what it took Photoshop and a fast (and expensive) Mac to do back then.
As I've experienced a hundred vintage computers, the lines in their capabilities are utterly blurred. I can't imagine how an Intel 286 CPU clocked at 12.5mhz is any more or less practical or necessary than an Apple IIc Plus. It's all clunky kludgy claptrap that reminds me of the early attempts of man to fly.
It all depends on what you wanted or needed to do with it. If you're happy writing letters to people and printing them (slowly) on your dot-matrix printer, than the //c+ would be perfectly fine for you.
Yes, there were a LOT of computers in the 80s and 90s particularly. IBM PC Clones proliferated. Manufacturers sprung up left and right, all using the Intel x86 series of chips and chipsets, so there was a LOT of overlap manufacturer to manufacturer. Dell? Compaq? HP? Packard Bell? They all produced PCs that could do the job, but how do you pick one or the other?
Apple stayed the course with the Motorola chips, then the PowerPC chips, until they had cooling issues with the G5s (sound familiar?) and the Motorola/IBM performance map for the PowerPC wasn't as robust as that of Intel at the time.
Evolution comes in small changes. A few megahertz here, a smaller floppy disk there, etc. It would be impossible to just up and change from selling a Mac SE/30 to dropping the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra in a single bound. All the steps (well, most of them...) in between all contributed in some way to what we have now.
I recall the company I worked for buying their first 1 (One!) Gigabyte Hard Disk Drive. This was a full-height, 5 1/4" form factor (meaning it was as wide as a drive that used 5 1/4" floppy disks) multi-platter affair. Huge built-in power supply, SCSI interface (of course), and we got it when the price went down to $999...
That drive was needed to burn CDs (which was another expensive device), and the software of the day was very finicky about how you burned the CD. First, you needed a single drive partition the size of the CD you were burning (650 MB or thereabout, depending on drive and media), you put all your data on the partition, then you could burn the CD from there. Oh, and might as well go home for the night, or weekend, as between the 1x burn speed, and the speed of the HDD, SCSI connection, and the Mac you were using, it would take hours, and you prayed that the power stayed on in your SoHo office building...
I can imagine if your whole occupation required you to figure out how to make something happen precisely and quickly, but that's so hard to emulate today without the insight from the people that lived it. Just like how kids today may not be able to imagine how Tiger Electronics pocket games were fun, you just had to be there.
Once upon a time, computers occupied rooms, even buildings, and required custom systems to keep them cool and dust-free. The computer power it took to send men to the moon is dwarfed by what I carry on my wrist, much less in my pocket, or sits on my desk.
Many of us old-timers can recall playing STARWR on text terminals, there was a moon landing program you could play on a teletype, so many things you could do back then, even when you only had 8k (yes, K!, no M, no G...) of memory to work in (and only 184k storage on slow tape). efficient code was a must, especially of you were loading it from paper tape!
